My So-Called Adoption

Today at the TCA, the CW Network presented its new series premiering at midseason, Life Unexpected (the x, critics seem to be relieved, is no longer capitalized.)

The show's creator, Liz Tigelaar, spoke passionately and from first person experience about the fantasy element of an adoptee's life. Back when she was growing up, she says, she knew she had been born in DC, and so liked to imagine that she was the secret daughter of Nancy Reagan (!), and deserved to be living in the White House. (Her adoptive mother, she says, reminded her that basic math would show that this was not possible.)

"I don't want a baby, but i'd love it if a teenager showed up on my doorstep," Tigelaar enthused, in explaining how the idea occurred to her that immature bar owner Base (Kristoffer Polaha) and radio DJ Cate (Shiri Appleby) would be confronted one day by Lux (Brittany Robertson), the now teenaged daughter they gave up for adoption who needs their signatures to be emancipated from the foster care system. But then, not surprisingly in order to provide the setup for this series, the judge decides that Lux must stay in the uneasy dual custody of her birth parents. And so starts this story of an unconventional, dysfunctional family, augmented by Dawson's Creek's Kerr Smith, who here is all grown up himself as Cate's radio co-host and boyfriend.

Tigelaar says she herself met her real birth parents just recently, since starting this project. Her birth mother, whom she met in November, categorically stated, "I am not a radio DJ," in contrasting the show to their real lives. And "my own [adoptive] parents made me feel so special, and so wanted. And this girl [Lux] didn't get that at all," says Tigelaar, who like her alter-ego Robertson is a beautiful blonde, in contrasting the show to her real story.

And so, the details of the show come purely from Tigelaar's imagination as a writer, having gained her experience working as the assistant to the prolific and much-adored TV writer Winnie Holzman, creator of My So-Called Life, and writer of the book for Broadway's Wicked. Perhaps Life Unexpected will be the successor to that beloved but prematurely cancelled show, a 2nd Decade carrier of that teen angst pedigree.

Life Unexpected debuts on the CW on Monday, January 18 at 9 PM Eastern/Pacific.

Reading In Front of the TV: Season Finale by Susanne Daniels and Cynthia Littleton

When Susanne Daniels joined the nascent WB network in 1995 as a TV development executive, she had a premonition that the experience would someday make her an author as well. A fan of TV tell-alls, Daniels had just finished reading Outfoxed, which detailed the early days of “fourth network” Fox in the mid 1980s. “I thought, ‘Maybe one day there’ll be a book about the WB and how interesting the beginning has been here, too.’”

In Season Finale, Daniels and co-author Cynthia Littleton look deep inside the turbulent twelve-year existences of both the WB and its archrival, same-time startup network UPN. “As I had gained more distance,” says Daniels, who left the network and its Michigan J. Frog mascot in 2001 and who until recently was the president of entertainment at cable network Lifetime, “I realized that the story was not just about the WB, but a tale of two new networks whose separate fortunes alternately rose and fell as they engaged in a brutal fight for fifth place.”

The mid-90s were a unique era where, encouraged by Washington’s relaxation of its regulations governing network ownership and not yet enamored with the internet, two media giants battled to become the next big thing in broadcast television. It was a period that Littleton already knew well, having pounded the fifth-network beat during her years as a reporter and editor at industry newspapers Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. “I was destined to write this book,” Littleton says, recalling how she and Daniels had for two years tossed around the idea of chronicling the confluence of factors which they felt made the days of 7th Heaven and Buffy the Vampire Slayer so fascinating. Then, on the morning of January 24, 2006, the WB and UPN networks unexpectedly announced their merger into the CW, the fifth network of today. “Susanne called me that morning,” Littleton remembers, “and said, ‘Now we have to do this.’”

Their separate perspectives combined, the two women agree, provide a clearer look at the ‘90s media rollercoaster than either had ever had on her own. “Susanne lived it and lived to tell about it so eloquently, candidly – and cathartically,” Littleton explains. “And it was a fascinating process for me as a journalist, to go back and revisit things I’d covered as they were happening, and finding out how much I’d gotten right and how much I’d missed.”

An additional 70 interviewees supplement the Season Finale mix -- each, as Daniels notes, more than eager to share his or her own side of the saga. “A lot of people were rooting for this book,” she explains. “Especially on the WB side. For a company that had hit such heights in prime time, the way it ended was a little frustrating. They wanted to have the experience documented.” And document Finale does – every one of the double-crossing deals and last-minute corporate buyouts that radically altered Daniels’ and her UPN counterparts’ jobs by refocusing their target demographics and undermining their budgets virtually overnight.

In focusing as it does on the executive end of the networks’ story, Finale is far from a gossipy confessional. It’s not about the real-life love triangle among the cast of Dawson’s Creek, or which two Charmed actresses didn’t get along – okay, actually that stuff is in there, but it’s not the point. Like legendary former NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff before her, whose memoir The Last Great Ride chronicled that network’s heady days of the 1980s, Daniels provides her much more current experience as a primer for the aspiring exec -- or for any TV junkie who wants to understand the machinations that are really going on behind the small screen. “There are always politics,” Daniels explains, “and a minimum of thirty other factors that affect executives’ decisions.”

The quality of the programming is important, Season Finale stresses. “But,” as the WB and UPN networks’ short life spans proved, Daniels admits wistfully, “it’s not everything.”